When relays are employed in wireless systems, an end user's data and control signals should be communicated with a base station. When a mobile station has multiple path options due to the availability of relaying stations, communication can be achieved via the direct path between a base station and a mobile station, or via a relay path involving one or more relays between a base station and a mobile station. The path taken by the end user's data and control signals can affect the performance of the wireless system. The problem of determining which path that end user's data and control signals should take is referred to as the path selection problem.
Proposals to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (“IEEE”) standard 802.16j, submitted prior to the present invention, suggest including the selection of the path based on the overall capacity impact. For example, if there are two hops and each relay link can support equal data rates, for delay tolerant services, it is good to switch to the relay link only if the relay hops can support at least twice the data rate of the direct link to the base station.
However, these proposals do not take into consideration other factors that may influence the actual performance of the system and may incorrectly bias the path selection in favor of one path over another. For example, for certain classes of data and/or services, additional delay may not be tolerated and a direct path may be the only viable choice.
Therefore, what is needed is a system and method for selecting a path for routing data packets in a wireless communication system having relays which considers data and service parameters in making the selection.